In New York, in the summer of 1971, most of her friends have gone out of town. So Diane Arbus stays in her tiny apartment with its view of the Hudson (one envied by her neighbors). She haunts the Walker Evans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, goes to movies in the afternoon. A former classmate sees Arbus slumped in a seat at the 68th Street Playhouse, but the classmate, depressed herself, avoids talking to her.

Arbus has already established her name (MoMA has bought some of her photos) but her finances are a mess. She spent the past spring sparring with Harper's over an expenses claim. She picks up a few assignments--fashion shows, Tricia Nixon's wedding, a black separatist minster in Detroit, Hortense Calisher's latest author photo (Calisher has the shots destroyed). Arbus has, as she has for decades, found her art in photographing her menagerie of freaks: the misshapen, the distorted, those who hate their bodies, those who bear them like scarred trophies. Eddie Carmel, the "Jewish giant" of the Bronx, or a New Jersey housewife who makes her pet macaque wear a baby's bonnet and snowsuit, or an albino sword-swallower. The latter is the subject of one of Arbus' last photographs--she stands before a carnival tent, her arms outstretched, the sword half down her throat. The sword's hilt and the swallower's body each make a crucifix.

"Lately it's been striking me how I really love what I can't see in a photograph," Arbus tells her students in what will be the last photography class she teaches. She lingers on "the element of actual physical darkness...it's very thrilling to see darkness again."

In 1971 the radio is full of women. They ring across every narrow band, with songs of reckonings and negotiations. A marriage ends early one morning, cloud-strained daylight falling across the kitchen table. Another ends late one night with a call from a phone booth. In Irma Thomas' "We Won't Be In Your Way Anymore," we never hear Thomas' husband as he surveys his empty home--maybe he's stunned, or screaming. Thomas just dissects the marriage (disclosing she's been beaten in the last verse), tells him where his wallet and keys are, lets him know the kids will be all right now. "You done me wrong, you done us wrong," she sings at the fadeout. Those are her final words to him: her phone call lasts only as long as the record. (Two Phases of Irma Thomas)

Carole King's "It's Too Late," played everywhere that summer, answers "One Fine Day," which King co-wrote when she was 21. The wedding photos are in boxes in the closet, the only conversations left are vague reminiscences about when they first met. Old friends' names come up as punchlines to forgotten jokes. The woman wakes one morning and knows she can't play her part anymore, though she tries to cushion the blow. King's piano chords slam close each verse, and finally the song. It's a wintry contrast to the ebullient piano line with which King had opened the Chiffons' track: innocence at last bows to experience. (Tapestry).

Pat Nixon at work in the White House, ca. 1971

In early 1971 Lynn Anderson's "Rose Garden" tops the pop and country charts; its rhinestone arrangement and dancing melody make it fit for a Nixon White House social. Yet its lyric is blunt as it is wise, sung by a wife standing her ground, brokering her humanity. As with other songs hanging in the air that year, it can be ground down to a single line: It doesn't have to be this way; it won't be this way any longer.(16 Greatest Hits.)

Gloria Steinem, interviewing Pat Nixon on the campaign plane during the '68 election, had asked Nixon who her greatest influences had been when she was growing up. Who had she identified with?

Pat Nixon, born in a Nevada mining town, had lost her mother to cancer and her father to silicosis before she was 18. She had made it through the Depression taking any job she could find--as a cashier, an X-ray tech, sweeping floors in a bank. She and her husband had clawed out of the hole with their fingernails; she had endured the humiliation of having her husband beg for his VP slot on national television, and she would endure worse in August 1974, smiling while her husband boarded a helicopter home to California. So Pat Nixon looked at Steinem, took her measure, drew a breath. "I never had time to dream about being someone else," she said. "I had to work."

New Woman magazine hires Arbus to shoot Germaine Greer, who has recently helped to pummel Norman Mailer in a debate over feminism. Greer opens the door of her Chelsea Hotel room to see "a rosepetal-soft delicate girl" struggling with her camera equipment. Greer, six feet tall and imperious, has sympathy. Yet once she's set up, Arbus commands Greer to lie flat upon her hotel bed, and nearly slams her wide-angle lens into Greer's face. She baits Greer, asks intrusive, personal questions, snaps the shutter whenever Greer tenses or snaps out an answer. So Greer makes her face a mask. "It was tyranny. Really tyranny," Greer later told Patricia Bosworth. "But because [Arbus] was a woman I didn't tell her to fuck off. If she'd been a man, I'd have kicked her in the balls." The session's a failure: New Woman rejects the photos.

Also in the Chelsea Hotel while Arbus wars with Greer: Harry Smith, in Room 705, playing Skip James 78s for a visiting monk; Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern, stumbling out onto 23rd Street convinced that it's Sunday; Patti Smith, a scrawny kid hanging out in the lobby. Radios and hi-fis, their voices barely muffled by the walls, carry the news: the swagger-beat of Jean Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff"; its muddy, impenetrable answer record by Vicki Anderson; the modern girl group hit "Want Ads," where the singers, hardened by betrayal, saunter back into the market (the line "going to the evening news" sounds like "going to the interviews," a finer, colder phrase, with sex becoming just another job) (Soulful Sugar).

Merry Clayton, born in Louisiana, makes Neil Young's "Southern Man" a damnation, singing the three syllables of "suh-thern-MAN" like three downward thrusts of a knife. Ruth Copeland turns the Stones' "Play With Fire" on its head. The original has Mick Jagger in his typical '60s role, a rake taunting a slumming upper-class girl. Now Copeland's working-class girl, her family still back in the coal mines, slowly rips her would-be seducer to bloody tatters. (Invictus Sessions.)

It was the height of the suicide years. Mark Rothko in 1970, John Berryman hurling himself off the Washington Avenue Bridge in 1972, Anne Sexton sitting in her garage two years later. Shelley Broaday, a photographer who lived in Arbus' building, leaped off the roof in spring 1971. Pills and drink, the neighbors said. The kids living down the hall from Arbus begin writing songs about suicides--they had already known a few.

The songs keep coming, filling the spaces. Joni Mitchell, mourning a child she gave up for adoption, imagining the life she would have no hand in forming, asserts that "you're sad and you're sorry but you're not ashamed." (Blue). Shirley Bassey, in the theme song of a dreadful new James Bond film, casts her lot with money (Diamonds Are Forever OST). Betty Wright rues that she neglected her man enough to let another woman poach him (I Love The Way You Love); Bonnie Raitt, reviving a Sippie Wallace blues (Raitt used Wallace as her lodestar in those years), offers hard wisdom while she readies to pounce (s/t).

Sometime--morning, late at night--on 26 July 1971, Diane Arbus lies down, clothed, in her bathtub after taking an overdose of barbiturates, and slashes her wrists. Up on the roof, the kids are listening to the Apollo 15 launch. Arbus has two daughters. She is forty-eight. Her journal's last entry, on 7/26: "The Last Supper." The last person to have seen her alive was Walter Silver, who saw her on the street carrying a flag. There's a persistent rumor that Arbus had set her camera up to shoot her in the tub.

Only a few people went to Arbus' funeral in early August. Most of her friends were away for the summer, and they didn't hear the news until they came back to the city. Richard Avedon, an old friend, did make it, and he was heard saying he wished he could've been an artist like her. And his old friend Frederick Eberstradt allegedly whispered back: "No you don't."It shouldn't end there. End it with jubilation, whether in Mary Lou Williams reviving "What's the Story Morning Glory?"(Nite Life), or the Berkeley-based collective The Joy of Cooking. "Goin' to Brownsville/gonna take that right-hand road," hymn Toni Brown and Terri Garthwaite. Or end it with resilience, with Esther Phillips' "I'm Getting 'Long Alright" (Confessin' the Blues).

Top: Diane Arbus, "Germaine Greer, Feminist In Her Hotel Room," 1971.

Many details taken from Howard Sounes' Seventies and especially Patricia Bosworth's Diane Arbus: A Biography.

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

What Now?

"If this prologue goes on much longer, it will be 1972."

Anonymous wit, on the previous post.

So, yes, after making a big deal about reviving the site and changing direction, etc., I stop posting again. This is owed to a number of reasons, including lack of inspiration and work-related exhaustion, but primarily it's because Blogger has made it quite clear that this site is getting axed if there's one more music "infraction."

I mean, when they delete Keep the Coffee Coming, of all people, it's a sign that MP3 blogging is really not viable any more, on Blogger at least. It was a good run, really, and it lasted far longer than I expected.

So what now? I'm really not sure. I'd like to keep this place up, if solely as a repository for the old stuff, and I hope to keep doing some early '70s related stuff, possibly as Youtube links, or other things. For now, if you're desperate for my writing and dig Bowie in the slightest, check out my other site.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

1971: A Prologue, Starring Richard Nixon

Rod Stewart, Amazing Grace.John Fahey, Amazing Grace.I would like to leave a renewed conviction in America that the system does work, that democratic government is better than the alternatives, that reforms can be made through peaceful change...In a sense it's all right here in this room, right here in this chair. Whoever is President of the United States, and what he does, is going to determine the kind of world we have.

Pres. Richard Nixon, to Allen Drury, 1 April 1971.

Star of show--square type--named Archie. Hippy son-in-law...The show was a total glorification of homosex. Made Arch look bad, homos look good. Is this common on TV? Destruction of civilization to build homos. Made the homos as the most attractive type. Followed Hee Haw.

Nixon to H.R. Haldeman, ca. late May 1971, the morning after Nixon watched "All In the Family" for the first time.We've checked and found out that 96 percent of the bureaucracy are against us; they're bastards and they're here to screw us...You've got to realize the press aren't interested in liking you; they're only interested in news or screwing me.

Nixon, speaking at a full Cabinet meeting, 29 June 1971.

You hear a lot of stuff around that the U.S. is not to be trusted with power. You hear that our presidents lie us into wars. You hear that the U.S. is imperial and aggressive. But we build up our enemies after wars, and we ask not for one acre. What will we get for ourselves after Vietnam? Nothing.

If we retreat from the world scene, who's left? With all our stupidity, with all our impetuousness, what other nation in the world is as idealistic than the United States?

Nixon at the first meeting of his Productivity Commission, 29 June.

Washington is full of Jews...Most Jews are disloyal...Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?

Nixon to Haldeman, 3 July 1971. (At the end of the conversation, Nixon sent out a presidential order to a staff member to see how many Jews were in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

He has to realize he can't stay forever. We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me. I don't think he would want to. I mean he considers himself a patriot, but he now sees himself, as McCarthy did, and perhaps Agnew now does, he sees himself as the issue, rather than the issue, which is the great weakness of any political man.

The Sixties ended badly everywhere...But if the Sixties seemed at last to pass unmourned and with few enduring monuments, this was perhaps because the changes that they did bring about were so all-embracing as to seem natural and, by the early Seventies, wholly normal. At the start of the decade Europe was run by and--as it seemed--for old men...Yet within ten years the old men (Churchill, Adenauer, De Gaulle) were dead.

Tony Judt, Postwar.

On that cold Wednesday morning, Rothko's assistant Oliver Steindecker came to work as usual at nine o'clock. He unlocked the door to the studio on 69th Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side and called out a robust "good morning" as he did every day. But on this morning there was no answer. Steindecker went to Rothko's bed, which he discovered to be empty. He searched everywhere, finally going to the section where the kitchen and bath were located, to find Rothko lying on the floor beside the sink, covered in blood, with both of his arms slit open and a razor blade by his side...The autopsy showed that aside from the deep incisions, the artist had also suffered acute poisoning from anti-depressants. He was 69 years old.

The song tells us of our old way of living,Of life in former times. Fragrance of florals,How things merely ended when they ended,Of beginning again into a sigh. Later,

Some movement is reversed and the urgent masksSpeed toward a totally unexpected endLike clocks out of control. Is this the gestureThat was meant, long ago, the curving in

Of frustrated denials, like jungle foliageAnd the simplicity of the ending all to be let goIn quick, suffocating sweetness? The dayPuts toward a nothingness of sky...

John Ashbery, "Song," from The Double Dream of Spring, 1970.

Times Square, ca. 1970.

Our story resumes in New York City in 1970, a city divested by its country. Once the United States' collective aspiration, New York has become the broken compact, an easy shorthand for the news-magazines, used to stand for blight, crime, general menace. Worse, it's come to represent The City itself, and the U.S., which still has a farmer's narrow soul, wants nothing more than to be rid of it.

Life in NYC, ungovernable and forsaken, goes on as it has for much of its history. Its recently-acquired intaglio of decay and menace provide one small benefit---it drives off the speculators and keeps the monied class within its confines. So for some twenty years you could be an artist and actually live in Manhattan.

Or across the river, where in a decaying Hoboken apartment building live a collective of musicians called The Insect Trust. Most are from Memphis: one, the clarinetist/historian Robert Palmer, is photographed sitting on what seems to be a milk jug--behind him Hoboken looks like a medieval French town but for the telephone lines. Another shot has the guitarist Bill Barth wrapped in a quilt, peering out the window as if the house is surrounded by policemen.

"Be a Hobo" is the Trust's version of a chant by Louis "Moondog" Hardin, who in 1970 could be found standing on 54th St., usually dressed as a Viking. "Hoboken Saturday Night," the Trust's ode to minor rowdy pleasures, is sung by Nancy Jeffries, whose voice is that of a dedicated enthusiast, of a woman who, suddenly taken by a song she's hearing, sings her way into it.

The two tracks lead off Hoboken Saturday Night. The band broke apart soon afterward: Trevor Koehler, a saxophonist/flutist who worked with Gil Evans, killed himself in 1976; Palmer, who died in 1997, wrote Deep Blues and helped create PBS' 1995 Rock and Roll (still the best rock documentary ever made, still shamefully unavailable (though piecesof it arefinallyturning up)); Barth became a painter in Amsterdam and died in 2000; Jeffries went into the record industry and signed Suzanne Vega, Deee-lite and Freedy Johnston.

In 1970 Ornette Coleman lived in a loft on 131 Prince Street, in Soho, that he soon would offer up as a practice space and performance hall. Early in the year Coleman and some of his longtime collaborators put on a show for his neighbors: one of the songs, "Friends and Neighbors," featured everyone in the audience singing along while Coleman brutally interrogated a fiddle.

"Forgotten Songs," a fanfare and call to arms, is from the same session--recorded on Valentine's Day, 1970, at 131 Prince St., with Dewey Redman (ts), Charlie Haden (b) and Ed Blackwell (d); on the now out-of-print Friends and Neighbors. (In 2006, a co-op at 131 Prince sold for $1.5 million.)

John and Yoko survey the estate, 1970.

There is so much light here--his life force pulling us all together, letting himself finally touch; the gentle eyes of the people Van and I love so much smiling...Look at the photographs and marvel, as we do, at the good feeling that radiates from [Van] now--to you all with love...

Janet Planet, liner notes to Van Morrison's His Band and the Street Choir.

So if the city was evil and irredeemable, it's no surprise that the age-olddream of the pastoral had returned. (Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, at the end of the decade, snorted that he preferred the new disco to all the Sixties "country" music that "tried to take us back and make us better than we are"). The record sleeves of 1970 are littered with contented, stoned rock singers posing with their doting hippie wives/girlfriends and their scattered, bewildered children, all standing in farmyards or fields, or arrayed on the back porches of vast houses paid for by royalty advances. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young wear knock-off Army of the Potomac uniforms for Deja Vu; Paul and Linda McCartney share snapshots from life on McCartney's Scottish farm; even Dylan wanders alone through the Saugerties landscape on his official bootleg Self Portrait.

Few were immune to it: my parents, two Irish Catholic teenagers who had spent their whole brief lives in New Haven, suddenly decided to move, along with their two-year-old son, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Jack Nicholson jumps on a tractor-trailer heading to Alaska at the end of Five Easy Pieces; Jimmy Page and Robert Plant hole up in Headley Grange, writing songs; The Band sing about scurrying back to their Catskill nests in "Time To Kill" (though the country life would kill Richard Manuel's songwriting, and even Levon Helm got hooked on smack in Woodstock). Neil Young used his 1,500-acre ranch in La Honda, California, as a wall between him and the world (this version of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" was recorded as a rehearsal for a KQED-TV broadcast on 17 February 1970).

Bruce Cockburn's "Going to The Country" offers a variation on the dream, the modesty of its aspirations suggesting that for once the dream could be feasible; on Cockburn's first self-titled LP.

Work: "All I want to do is make some money/and bring you home some wine/for I don't want you ever to see me, standing in that line." Inspired in part by the humiliations endured by Ray and Dave Davies' father; on The Kinks' Lola vs. Powerman.

The pop charts were full of God and fear, of lullabies and chants borne by the amoral radio, absently hummed in taxis, crackled through faulty PA systems in beach towns, played on dust-flecked and scratched 45s that were brought to birthday parties or to show-and-tells (one such record bore a jam stain on its B-side, another was cracked into three equal shards after a child foolishly had stowed it in his knapsack). The songs opened like novels, closed like police reports. The preacher talked with me and he smiled (Tim Rose's cover of "I've Gotta Get a Message to You," is on Love, a Kind of Hate Story); dyin' young is hard to take, sellin' out is harder.

There was "Jennifer Tomkins," whose nameless singer worries about "trouble, trouble everywhere," whose title character is orphaned as a child, betrayed as a teenager. The song started life provisionally titled "Bubblegum Has Come to Town," but its creators (including Rupert Holmes) decided that the bubblegum vogue had ended, and so brought in poor Jennifer, sister to Mary Maguire (put on trial for prostitution) or Alice or the other lost girls of the late Sixties. (On 25 All Time Greatest Bubblegum Hits).

Or Freda Payne's "Band of Gold," a #3 hit in summer 1970 (#1 in the UK). Like Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe," from a few years before, its story is only half-told, the rest exists in gaps and silences. A child bride, an impotent (or gay) husband, a quick annulment: it seems to be a fragment of some Victorian domestic horror, a lost family scandal somehow unearthed in the tumult of the late '60s.

This is an earlier take where the elements have yet to gel, as the sitar hook isn't as pronounced and there's an odd bridge that doesn't work (and was scrapped). But Payne is grappling with a song that will make her immortal, and she finally drowns herself in it. (The alternate version shows up in various places like here.)

Two of the Staples Singers made solo records in 1970. Mavis tried on some new attitudes ("Chained" is on Only For the Lonely) while Pops remembered a lost, shameful memory ("Black Boy," released as Stax 0064 c/w "Tryin' Time" in March 1970, is on Stax-Volt Singles Vol. 2.

Hepworth, The Family of Man (Yorkshire Sculpture Park).

Soundtracks: Johnnie Mandel's "Suicide Is Painless" is from Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, its lyric written by Altman's 14-year-old son. On M*A*S*H OST.

Antônio Jobim was hired by Paramount to compose a few songs for a Hollywood mortuary piece called The Adventurers, an adaptation of a Harold Robbins novel. One of Jobin's pieces was his love theme "Amparo," a gorgeous nocturne with Jobim on two keyboards and Hubert Laws on flute. The song will survive us, the film is scarcely remembered, the book is already forgotten. Recorded 16 March 1970 (with Ron Carter on bass); on Stone Flower.

Holding the line, Vietnam, 1970.

Variations: in the depths of Miles Davis' churning set on the last night of a stint at the Fillmore East, the concerts that established Davis as the jazzman for the rock age, Davis offered an eerie, brief rendition of Wayne Shorter's "Sanctuary."

The British composer William Walton, in the summer of 1969, composed a variation on a theme that he had heard decades before from his countryman, friend and rival Benjamin Britten. He originally entitled it Elegiac Variations but decided the piece deserved a happier ending.

Here is the third movement, moderato. The piece was premiered by Josef Krips in San Francisco on 14 January 1970 and is performed here by the London Philharmonic (Raphael Wallfisch, cond.).

Richard Nixon and staff watch the splashdown of Apollo 13.

Vintage Violence is John Cale's bubblegum record: "Cleo" could be a 1910 Fruitgum Company song; "Big White Cloud" is bizarro Phil Spector. Cale wrote and recorded the songs at a pace, trying and failing to write songs that could be played on the radio.

Everything was slightly off--the lyrics seemed badly translated from another language ("my power amphibious bride," "someone took the tuba for a pony ride"), the production ranged from the pristine to the murky. Cale sang love songs from a man stuck in Australia, offered thoughts on death, recalled time spent in barrooms and hotels, told ghost stories. "Gideon's Bible" is as unknowable as the rest.

In Tove Jansson's Moomin novels, there's a character named Snufkin, a slight figure in a long coat who wears a wide-brimmed hat he's owned since birth: he arrives with the spring and departs for the south when the leaves start to turn. Donovan played this role in the 1960s, and as the times changed he wrapped up his few belongings, belted his coat and went off along the southern road, leaving the valley towns to contend with the winter and the floods. He left a note by the door, but no one cared to read it. (On Open Road.)

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Hello. In a bid to revive this site, I'm doing a couple of radical things. First, as the very look of the place was getting me down--it was shabby and ugly and dated--this new template (with which I will keep tinkering) is a first step towards bringing Locust St. into the 2010s. Sadly, as yet I've been unable to move all the old comments over, and worst-case scenario is that they'll be unmovable. So if that's true, my apologies to anyone who's commented over the years whose words have been erased by the capricious hand of Blogger.

Secondly, we're done with the 1920s for a long while. It got to be too much, and I likely would have just stopped doing the blog entirely--there were days I sat down to do "1925" and couldn't will myself to write a word. So I'll do what I've always done when inspiration has deserted me here: a time-jump. This will also be a means to get this place better tied in with my other research/writing/nonsense (Bowiesongs) of late.

The template change also erased the various internal links I had created, so use the following list as a sort-of long-delayed table of contents:

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world.

Buck Griffin, 1923-2009. A weathervane who turned in any direction he could: country, rockabilly, blues. "Ballin' and Squallin'," from 1955, is on Let's Elope Baby.Estelle Bennett, the forgotten Ronette (1941-2009), and a bard of postwar teenage America, Ellie Greenwich (1940-2009). Greenwich co-wrote "Baby I Love You" and Bennett helped bring it to life; on Wall of Sound.

Sirone (Norris Jones), 1940-2009. Bassist and co-founder of The Revolutionary Ensemble, later a member of James Blood Ulmer's Phalanx. On the magnificent 1975 LP The People's Republic, which has never been released on CD.

Louisa Mark, 1960-2009. The belle of lovers' rock. "Keep It Like It Is," from 1977, is on Breakout.

Fayette Pinkney, 1948-2009. Original member of The Three Degrees, Prince Charles' favorite band. "Collage" is on 1970's Maybe.Michael Jackson, 1958-2009. A line that Chrissie Hynde wrote at the peak of Jackson's fame serves as his epitaph: "the wretched life of a lonely heart." On 1971's Got To Be There, collected on Music & Me.